For the young author, it was, in hindsight, “one of those mysterious periods in which new ideas are hovering in the air”. In an introduction to a later edition of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins describes its gestation: it was a book written in extremis (the power cuts and industrial strife of the early 1970s) and, as he says, “in a fever of excitement”. He buttonholes his readers he dazzles with paradox and provocation. Much of this book’s appeal lies in its author’s barely suppressed excitement, prose that bubbles over with the intoxication of a brilliant new approach. This insight, he reports, is “a truth which still fills me with astonishment”. It is designed to appeal to the imagination.” Part of the book’s compulsion derives from Dawkins’s appealing certainty that he is exploring a scientific world in which “we are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”. The Selfish Gene, he declares, should be read “almost as though it were science fiction. His book would extol, he wrote, a “gene’s-eye view of evolution”.įrom his first page, Dawkins unfolds an exhilarating and combative narrative of the gene’s-eye view of life with infectious brio. Dawkins was convinced that an amplified and developed version of neo-Darwinism “could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain”. He called it The Selfish Gene, a title he later considered to contain an unconscious echo of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. Following some notable pioneers such as WD Hamilton and GC Williams, Dawkins pulled together many disparate strands of thought about the nature of natural selection, and organised them into a conceptual framework with far-reaching implications for our understanding of Darwin’s ideas. Enter Richard Dawkins, a young Oxford zoologist who had been born, and partly raised, in Africa. A hundred years later, in the heady, innovative atmosphere of the 1960s, a new generation of young and ambitious evolutionary biologists found themselves confronted with a rare opportunity: the rediscovery and renewal of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s answer to this simple question was to show that every earthly species – chimps or humans, lizards or fungus – had evolved over about 3bn years by the process known as natural selection.īut then, after the furious controversy surrounding that publication, Darwin’s celebrated theory fell into neglect and misuse.

W hat is man, and what are we for? Remarkably, it was not until Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 that anyone, in our history, had thought methodically to address the reason for our existence.

The selfish gene book